Earned Value Management

When agile practices are implemented for the first time in a waterfall environment, more predictive techniques like earned value management (EVM) will need to be integrated. Here, a practitioner looks at two sprint examples to explain how this approach works.

Find answers to these questions and more in this Earned Value Management Practice Area. If you are new to Earned Value Management, take advantage of the resources below and don't be shy about commenting or asking questions. If you're a seasoned pro, help others out and become an influencer. We welcome contributions from all sources and the more you participate, the more visible you become. Let us help you move down the road from "giver of sage advice" to "Thought Leader".

Donald G. Reinertsen was at Booz Allen Hamilton when he coined the term “Fuzzy Front End” in an article for PMI in the 1980’s. He did so because he thought there was something going on up there at the beginning of New Product Development but it was fuzzy. I interviewed him for an article a few years later. By then he had come to dislike the term, “Fuzzy Front End”. He felt that, after more study, there were a number of tools and processes in place (some for decades), that made the front end into a repeatable process. Together we changed the original premise to “Fuzzy Logic” for the article. That concept of Fuzzy Logic (sampling the environment, the market, technology, the competition, etc.) became the basic concept behind this important discovery stage and the basis for many popular branded processes like Hunting for Hunting Grounds™. Never mind Reinertsen’s new thinking, the term “Fuzzy Front End” was catching on by the mid-90’s in the New Product Development community and perpetuated the myth of this stage as somewhat mystical. This webinar will attempt to demystify the new product discovery.

Clarifying and widening the status quo around value, especially at the enterprise level. This webinar aims to offer an explanation of value management that goes beyond the notion of value engineering and process-based tools.

It isn't easy to make exact copies of even a simple product, but at least you begin that effort knowing what "done" looks like. Development introduces a special kind of challenge – you only learn what "done" looks like at the end. The critical path for execution becomes dependent upon the critical path for definition and vice versa. The development path can be thought of as a part "altitude" you wish to attain and part "distance" you must travel to get there. We'll use this powerful analogy to explore why development outcomes vary so widely, why Agile methods are essential, and to help you plot the optimum launch trajectory for any given effort.

In Expert Judgment: How to Incorporate the Latest Developments in Using this Common PM Tool, Paul S. Szwed provides research that will help project managers become more adept at using expert judgment effectively.

This Excel sheet performs the calculation for earned value and earned schedule analysis. The forecast resulting from all KPIs [time-based SPI, CPI, CPI (internal), CPI (external) and WPI] is calculated based on the different forecast methods proposed by A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). The user can choose which method shall be used for each KPI.

This MS Excel template is an example of a small or middle-range project including a WBS, a simplified schedule and a summary of progress, which uses earned value management (EVM). The supporting article (Stop Being Scared of Spreadsheets!) encourages mainly junior PMs to play with the template and practice their knowledge on small projects. The article is not a step-by-step tutorial. Instead of detailed instructions, it discusses a few things that are crucial to start both managing projects and advanced work with spreadsheets.

Are you looking beyond individual departments and focusing on the value created in the full series of activities they perform to create and deliver their product? Here’s the story of one PM who was willing to step beyond her role to move the focus of “better, cheaper, sooner” to the whole chain of work her firm delivered to its customer.

Question: One of my colleagues told me that they are changing the earned value management (EVM) formulas. We have many projects in progress, with automated charts and spreadsheets configured with the current calculations I was taught to use in my Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification exam prep training. Is this true that the math is being altered by PMI?

When it comes to scheduling, you cannot do advanced tasks before covering the basics. Most people want to do PERT analyses and critical path sensitivities, Monte Carlo simulations and applications of earned value techniques. Those tools can be helpful in providing guidance for better decision making, but a lot of ground must be covered first.

It can sometimes get lost that there are a great number of projects initiated every day that will never have a formal budget associated to them. It is important that PMs and management not lose sight that even internal projects can benefit from the rigor of cost management processes and EVM principles.

Scared of spreadsheets? Don't be! They are a necessary and valuable tool in the project manager's arsenal. This article and its accompanying template are not a step-by-step tutorial. Instead of detailed instructions, it discusses a few things that are crucial to start both managing projects and completing advanced work with spreadsheets.

The use of traditional empirical project management tools can be used in a simple way to manage and control project deadlines and costs without losing the flexibility of agility. In this article, we are going to mix a traditional technique with agile management using a simple practical example.